“Go on and sleep if you like, Easy. I got it,” Michael Wilson murmured. “Fat boy already checked out.”
“All right,” East said quietly. Walter had gone facedown on the tray of his breast.
Ty’s video game behind him trumpeted happily. A new level.
In the afternoon darkness, they stopped for gas.
The ground had flattened—hills and fences, scrub and arroyo. But mostly empty. Sometimes East found his eyes had gone blurry, the miles spinning past like bus-window reflections. Normal afternoons, he’d sleep seven hours and get up for a while before heading to the house. Last night’s sleep had been full but fruitless: his head was dried up, his lips stiff. The sun lay way over on the mountains, behind a shelf of cloud.
“Where are we?” said Walter, blinking too.
“This the desert, son,” declared Michael Wilson.
Shimmering heat. The low sun wasn’t sending it, but the pavement below them glowed white. East stepped quickly across.
The bathroom outside was locked, so he pissed in the back between two sun-cooked cars. Around him, the ground made a cracking sound, fine dry things touching in the breeze. Part of the moon was up, a white tab.
Inside the gas station, different oils, girl magazines. One ice cream cooler and one for drinks. Next to the counter where you paid for the gas was a grill.
“I can make you something, hon,” said a woman, white, sun-scraped.
There was nothing in the place that he needed. He wandered outside. Michael Wilson stood squeegeeing the windshield.
“Boy, did you just piss out in the field?”
East glanced down. “Yeah. I just pissed out in the field.”
The older boy laughed. “Country already.”
East didn’t answer. The jokes, the small laughs. He recognized Michael Wilson working, trying to do his job. The light talk of the leader. He dawdled past the van and stood on the apron of concrete and loose stones, looking around at the unbuilt land. Something moved in the distance, a ghost or tumbleweed. He’d seen a tumbleweed once, in a cartoon. This looked like that, a cartoon tumbleweed in cartoon land, hills and rubble, nothing with a name. Nothing real.
“Get in, Country,” called Michael Wilson. “We got to find something for y’all to eat.” And East turned back to the van, pale blue and dusty, like the sky.
5.
Only once did Michael Wilson try talking to Ty. They were riding out what was left of California. Or maybe it was Nevada. The land was dark, and sometimes the spread of headlights showed them low, brushy hills. Michael Wilson leaned away from the wheel.
“What’s your story back there, young’un? Fighting them aliens still?”
A long, intent wait, and then the voice floated back, quavery, almost a little girl’s: “Are you talking to me?”
“Yeah.” Michael Wilson, for once, was not laughing.
“Tired of riding, man,” Ty said. “Tired of bullshit. Why we ain’t flying?” He switched back on the game with a musical flourish, as if the conversation were over.
This pushed Walter’s button. “Oh, no. Really, man? Impossible. No way.”
Michael Wilson: “We trying to keep low, young’un. You gotta use a credit card to buy a plane ticket. ID to buy, ID to get on. It don’t matter if the ID ain’t real; they still gonna track you.”
Their song changed quick, thought East. Bitching about it themselves an hour ago.
“We’d be so fucked,” said Walter. “They would know where we get off, where we catch a ride.”
“So there’s some trouble? Four little black boys done shot a man? A man who’s a witness in LA next week? Look, I see where we got these four little Negroes just flown in from LA.”
“I wonder when they flying back.”
“Let’s get a picture of them off the video.”
“Let’s call up the SWAT team.”
Michael Wilson laughed. “Airborne Negro Detection System activated.”
To all of this Ty snarled, “So what if they do?”
Michael Wilson and Walter glanced across at each other, holding their merriment.
“Fuck you,” said Ty. “The both of you.”
East sat with hands folded inside the red blanket. Pinning it shut. So this would be it. The funny faces in front tangling with Ty. For days.
“Oh, maybe you could fly,” said Walter. “But you a wanted man then. This way, we’re sneaking in, sneaking out. You remember that astronaut lady who wanted to kill her boyfriend’s new girl? Drove all the way from Texas to Florida to get away with it? She had gas cans in the back, never stopped. She wore diapers, man, trying to keep off the cameras.”
“You remember that astronaut lady?” Ty sneered, and in the back he muttered softly to himself like an old injured dog. Again his thumbs worked the buttons of his game. And that was the end of Michael Wilson talking to Ty.
—
They were awake, but softly. Then Michael Wilson spoke. “You want to take a little drive into Vegas? See the sights?” The instrument panel lit the curve of his cheek like a moon.
“No,” said East.