A little compass on the ceiling glowed E. Only once did East turn to look back. Everything he recognized was already past: The Boxes. His gang. His mother. The abandoned, bullet-pecked house. The jimmied window and his crawl-space den. Fin and the gun he’d put to East’s forehead. Now it was just these boys he had left, this van. Nothing.
Behind him lay his brother, a video game squeaking under his thumbs. Uninterested. East tried to remember the last time he’d seen Ty. Maybe late summer. A couple of months at least. He hadn’t known where or how Ty was living. Not that Ty would tell. Talking to Ty, you ended up knowing less than you started with. He took a pleasure in sharing nothing, enjoying nothing, a scrawny boy who’d almost starved as a baby, didn’t eat, didn’t play—failure to thrive, the relief doctor said. Smart but didn’t like school, fast but didn’t like running. Never cried as a baby, never asked questions. Never loved anything but guns.
Hadn’t even said hi to East yet, his brother. Hadn’t acknowledged that he’d noticed East there. East wasn’t going to be the one to break the chill. He touched his forehead, the invisible scrape there, the gun’s kiss that said, This is important. He stared away sideways through the curved, tinted glass: the traffic crawled and the streets changed, a scroll of places. East had never seen these streets or the ones beyond. Fifteen years old, he had never left Los Angeles before.
In the center seat he had an overview—he could watch the streets, watch these boys. Michael Wilson’s head bobbed as he drove, talking, talking. Talking all the time, to everyone, even himself, a flow: he made music of it, he breathed through it. His sunglasses rode up top, and his head swung side to side, his white eyes dancing this way and that. So busy, thought East, working so hard. Walter, his head was lower down, bushier. He bulged off the seat into the middle and against the door. East had known some fat kids before, smart ones, worth something. But you couldn’t work them in the yard. Not outside, a standing-up job.
But Walter was getting tight with Michael Wilson. Giggling at him. “Never thought you’d be driving a fuckin florist’s van,” he proposed.
Michael Wilson lifted his hands from the wheel. “It don’t smell like flowers.”
East didn’t mind the van. He liked the seat, the middle view, the drab shade. The carpet was blue. The seats were blue. The ceiling was a long faded grayish-blue, little pills of lint in the nap. Where he sat, the smoky windows were an arm’s length away. They wouldn’t roll down; they only popped out on a buckle hinge. That would do. Everything was an arm’s length away.
He tucked his pillowcase under his seat and scouted in the knapsack hung on the back of Walter’s. Pens, a notepad. Soaps and towels, toothbrushes and paste. The sort of kit somebody’s mother would pack. And under the seat, a first-aid kit: gauze, ice packs, a flimsy red blanket that felt like wood splinters. CALL FOR HELP—AMBULANCE/POLICE was spelled out on one side. And four pairs of thin black nylon gloves.
Then the fat boy, Walter, cleared his throat and turned. He locked in on East. “Man, what you think when Fin held that barrel on you?”
“What’d I think?” East sniffed and looked off out the window. “Nothing.” He didn’t say: that is the second gun I’ve looked down in a day.
“Would stress me, man,” Walter said. Still staring at East. Finally East looked back, and Walter gave a little nod and turned forward.
“Nigger, for blood, Fin must not like you all that much,” said Michael Wilson.
“Fin says don’t say nigger,” East said flatly.
“Nigger, that’s unrealistic.” Silently Michael Wilson laughed at the windshield and bobbed his head to music, to a rocking horse in his mind. “In the man’s personal presence, I defer. But be for real.”
Walter said, “Michael. That word don’t mean nothing to you?”
“Not like it means to Easy.”
East shrugged. It was just a thing, a rule. Everyone broke it. But this trip was supposed to run tight. Rules were what they were. He supposed it would get wild at the end. That was later. Ty would see to that.
—
Out of habit, he studied them. Already bickering. “You got to get to I-15, man,” Walter was saying. “You gotta hit Artesia Freeway before you get to 605.”
“But you don’t even say it right. Ar-tess-ya.”
“It says it right here. Ar-tee-sia.”
“You ever been there, man? Cause I had a girl that way, and she said Ar-tess-ya.”
“You ain’t never had no girl except off a corner in the ghetto,” said Walter. “Just get us moving out this shit.”
“Play some music, then, Walt,” Michael Wilson ordered up.
For a minute, crouched over his stomach, Walter reached and fiddled with the radio. Nothing.
“Doesn’t work.”
“We supposed to have a genius,” mourned Michael Wilson. “Can’t even switch on a radio.”
“It don’t work.”
Ty’s game buzzed triumphantly. The screen for a moment turned his hands bright white.
“What you thinking back there, Easy?” said Michael Wilson, shimmying his head a few degrees over.
“He don’t talk much,” Walter opined. “He and his brother.”