Dodgers (30 page)

“What job?”

“The
judge
.”

Then East remembered the judge: his name, his face. The dark shape of him moving around in the bright cabin like a rat in an experiment. “Ty. Did the judge know you? He looked at you.”

“I bet he did.”

“He
smiled
at you,” East said.

Ty just laughed.

“You ain't gonna tell me?”

“No,” Ty said.

This
shit,
thought East. “But now you're saying I'm in charge.”

“Play that,” said Ty. “You always in charge. Fin had a hundred hungry niggers working, but you're the only one ever follows directions. Did you ever wonder how I had a gun after they took one off me?”

“You had a second one,” East said, “they didn't find.”

“Same one,” said Ty. “Fin gave it back. You listening now?”

“Forget it,” East seethed.

“East. You got your way. You understand that your way goes on top of my way. But your way don't stop me?”

“Just be quiet, man,” said East. The rain was letting up, and Ty took the exit to the airport. But East was in his mother's apartment again, arguing. Arguing for his life against this impossible boy.

“You stick to business,” said Ty. “But I am business, East.”

They sat hot in their seats, hating each other like brothers, till they pulled up to the terminal, gray planes hanging in the sky.

Along the departures curb, the gray Lincoln stopped.
NO PARKING. DROP-OFF ONLY.

Ty said, “When you're ready to drop it off, call this number.” A sticker on the dash. “Give them one hour. They meet you here. Or wherever you need.”

“What do I need? Credit card? Fill the tank?”

“Bitch, this ain't Avis. Just give the car back.” Ty handed East the keys. “Walter said you don't fly. So if you
got
to drive this car back to LA, okay. But call and let them know.”

East scanned the line of windows along the terminal. Airline porters. Police. Families pulling suitcases on small invisible wheels.

“Two more things,” said Ty. He popped a compartment between the two seats. “There's your phone. A charger too.”

East spun his phone in his fingers. The familiar weight and shape.

“Just be careful. Don't say much. Be smart. I called you. So my new phone is the last number on it.”

East stared at the phone. “Thanks,” he made himself say.

Ty reached down into the compartment again and came up with a roll of bills.

“Three thousand dollars, if something comes up,” he said. “This is
my
money, now. A loan to you from me. Understand? Say it.”

“It's your money.”

“All right. Take it.”

East let the money sit in Ty's hand for a long time. A debt he didn't want. But there was nothing else now.

He put it away in his pocket.

“Don't lose it.”

“I won't.”

“Plus this.” Ty fished a little silver gun out of the compartment, showed it, and replaced it. Then he took an envelope out and laid it on his thigh as he threaded the zipper on his jacket.
FIRST CLASS
, it said, just like East's.
DATE OPEN. JOE WARNER.

“So, this is it,” East said. “No luggage? Nothing?”

Ty shook his head.

“So. Six days. You got what you need. Any questions, you call me.”

Ty picked up his ticket. East studied him for a long moment. The sharp easiness. His long little balding head. Kidney bean—that's what their mother had called him.

“I don't want to come back here. Winter and shit. If I do, it's the old rules. There will be consequences.”

“I hear,” said East.

A hard chuck on East's arm, right on the bandage—East kept from crying out. Ty unsealed the door with a rush of wind. He climbed out and straightened his colorless jacket. Ticket folded over once in his hand, he checked the traffic behind them and then mounted the sidewalk, passing people in parkas and colorful letter jackets. East watched Ty hurry toward the electric doors, which slid open for him, just another young man on the way somewhere else.

It took East a moment: now he was expected to drive the Lincoln off.
DROP-OFF ONLY.
Not to slide over: to get out and walk around the big car. He did so, his hands and chest tingling. Paused at the driver's door and checked the little chrome key ring:
DODGERS
. The brand of home.

A girl passed on the sidewalk, small and black, leading her parents, who were all burdened down with garment bags and ski poles. East didn't look: he knew she would be the Jackson girl, all big eyes and bravery. That face swimming atop her face.

Then she was gone.

He coaxed himself onward, opened the door, lowered himself into the driver's seat.

Barely any noise. Solid. He checked the mirrors, moved the seatback up. He wished he'd watched the route more on the way. Ty drove the roads as if he knew them. East knew only one town.

If he could find his way back to the long old highway, he'd be all right.

The wind moved the trees. The rain was stopping. But the pavement was already dry.

The steering wheel was thick and almost drowsy in its softness. He would need a little sleep as soon as he could get it.

Back at the range, he spent a few hours. He polished the countertop. He cleaned the storeroom. In the evening dark he dragged items out to the Dumpster—his bed of clean, flat cardboard. His blankets—he saved his new, still-fresh pillow. The box he'd fit under at night. He slept his last night on the sofa, comfortable without the heaters. The cold didn't bother him now. He wasn't as skinny as he used to be.

The last day. East took alcohol and rubbed down the register, the bathroom, the door handles, the cabinets—any place he'd touched, any place he'd made his. He went to the bank and cleaned out his Ohio account, took cash, more than a thousand dollars. Added it to Ty's money and Walter's.

At a table outside the little grocery where farmers sometimes came, he bought a handmade bouquet. Dried flowers, yellow and orange. He walked them across the highway to the leaning-forward yellow house where Perry had lived with Marsha. He stood for a moment on the porch but didn't knock. He left it on a rocking chair beside her door, with a note that said,
From Antoine, thanks. RIP.
An ambiguous good-bye. He didn't know if she'd ever get them. He doubted she'd ever step inside the range again, or her son would. It seemed to have been abandoned, except for him. It seemed to have been just the one man's dream, and when he died, it stopped. East had left it spotless. He hadn't stolen a thing.

He cleaned the two old Iowa guns inside and out. Reburied them, deep this time. He spread the three like licenses out on the counter—East, Antoine, and the new one, the person who matched the plane ticket—and studied his face: the three times, different expressions, different shirts. But each one of them him. Each one a different life.

It wasn't easy to decide.

The first he chopped to bits was Antoine. The van. The guns. The trail they'd made. He cut it to bits with Perry's wire snips. Then it was down to the new name and East.

He wondered what Walter had invented for him, what sort of life, what weakness. What sort of story, should he not come back. And he was never going back.

In the end, he and East said good-bye. Age sixteen, licensed driver, State of California. Snipped him too into tiny squares. Wrapped him in the shreds of the one-way ticket back to Los Angeles. And left him in the trash can outside the doughnut shop, with the wrappers and the half-crushed cups of coffee. Became the new name, and no one else. He would grow into it as he was growing into the body stirring beneath him, the strange and turning body, as uneasy and teenage as it was hard and loyal. He looked different anyway now, fuller, older. The wind, the food—something out here was giving him pimples.

For a few minutes he parked the car at the range. He put his clothes and toothbrush in a grocery bag. Threw his pillow into the trunk. Wiped down counter and doorknobs again before exiting the building for good. Leaving the Lincoln visible while he did so was maybe not smart, but it would be fine. The car would do to take him east, to the dense snarl on the map, that opposite coast with its tangled cities: Washington, Philadelphia, New York. He had the rest of the week.

The sun was going down. The dog, the colorless dog, followed the border of the road, weaving. He had no food to offer it this time, but he whistled, and it came. He touched its scarred and rippled neck, and it whined. Sharp, black, careful eyes.

He opened the back door of the Lincoln, and warily it looked the car over. “Get in,” he said.

Before he left, he stopped and ate a doughnut. The place was nearly empty—the thin boy pouring coffee, two women from the grocery store, a lady truck driver in a fur collar eyeing her cab outside. He would miss this town, not that he'd ever liked it. It was a place he'd stopped and studied. But the way he was leaving felt like leaving home. He bought a second and third doughnut and had them packed in a paper bag. Take-away to anywhere. Outside, the strange dog lay asleep and breathing in the borrowed car.

He stood outside and took a last look around. It was growing night, but the town was not dark. Lights shone beside doors and over driveways, still air. Somewhere he sensed a clatter: he listened, then caught the voices, boys in a driveway shooting hoops, the echoes clashing. He could see the plumes of smoke, the exhalations of every chimney, rising and dispersing. Each house a quiet mystery.

Nobody watching. He fingered the keys his brother had handed him, and as he opened the door of the borrowed gray Lincoln, he caught himself, just a glimpse, in the curved window glass. Alone, the first few stars in the unswept sky behind him.

Then he was gone.

This book was largely drafted at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and I thank its staff and its many Fellows for their listening and encouragement and kinship.

Thanks to many people who helped
Dodgers
find its way: Dan Barden, Kevin Canty, my colleagues Wendy Bilen and Rewa Burnham. Wendy Brenner, my best-writer-friend from forever. Steve Yarbrough and other fellows and teachers at Sewanee Writers' Conference who helped me put the book in drive. My remarkable agent, Alia Hanna Habib, for her readings and advice, and everyone at McCormick Literary, especially Susan Hobson and Emma Borges-Scott. To Jon Cassir and his team at CAA.

At Crown: Nate Roberson, my editor, who has been unvaryingly patient and sharp-eyed and wise. To Barbara Sturman and Chris Brand for design. And to Danielle Crabtree, Dyana Messina, Rachel Rokicki, Lauren Kuhn, David Drake, and Molly Stern: I am deeply grateful for how you have received and imagined this story and what it might become.

And to my students at Trinity.

To my parents, for the world, and to Deborah Ager, for making it sweet.

Bill Beverly was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He studied at Oberlin College and at the University of Florida, where he earned a PhD in American literature. He teaches at Trinity University in Washington, DC.