They were lost. Streets in The Boxes were a maze: one piece didn’t match up straight with the next. So you might look for a house on the next block, but the next one didn’t follow up from this one. The street signs were twisted every which way or were gone.
The fire truck returned a minute later, going the other way. The boys waved. They were all in their teens, growing up, but everyone liked a fire truck.
“Over there,” said Sony.
“What?” said Antonio.
“Somebody house on fire,” said Sony.
The smoke rose, soft and gray, against the bright sky. “Probably a kitchen fire,” East said. No ruckus, nobody burning up. You could hear the wailing a mile away when someone was burning up, even in The Boxes. But more fire engines kept rumbling in. The boys heard them on the other streets.
A helicopter wagged its tail overhead.
—
By eleven it was getting hot, and two men crashed out of the house. One was fine and left, but one lay down in the grass.
“Go on,” Sony told him. “Get out of here.”
“You shut the fuck up, young fellow,” said the man, maybe forty years of age. He had a bee-stung nose, and under his half-open shirt East saw a bandage where the man had hurt himself.
“You go on,” said East. “Go on in the backyard if you got to lie down. Or go home. Not here.”
“This my house, son,” said the man, fighting to recline.
East nodded, grim and patient. “This my lawn,” he said. “Rules are rules. Go back in if you can’t walk. Don’t be here.”
The man put his hand in his pocket, but East could see he didn’t have anything in there, even keys.
“Man, you okay,” East said. “Nobody messing with you. Just can’t have people lying ’round the yard.” He prodded the man’s leg lightly. “You understand.”
“I own this house,” said the man.
Whether this was true, East did not know. “Go on,” he said. “Sleep in back if you want.”
The man got up and went into the backyard. After a few minutes Sony checked on him and found him asleep, trembling, fighting something inside.
—
The fire’s smoke seemed to thin, then came thicker. Trucks and pumps droned, and down the street some neighbor children were bouncing a ball off the front wall. East recognized two kids—from a neat house with green awnings, where sometimes a white Ford parked. These kids kept away. Someone told them, or perhaps they just knew. For the last two days there had been a third girl playing too, bigger. She could have grabbed every ball if she’d wanted, but she played nice.
East made himself stop watching them and studied the chopper instead where it dangled, breaking up the sky.
When he glanced back, the game had stopped and the girl was staring. Directly at him, and then she started to come. He glared at her, but she kept advancing, slowly, the two neighbor kids sticking behind her.
She was maybe ten.
East pushed off. Casually he loped down the yard. Sony was already bristling: “Get back up the street, girl.” East flattened his hand over his lowest rib: Easy.
The girl was stout, round-faced, dark-skinned, in a clean white shirt. She addressed them brightly: “This a crack house, ain’t it?”
That’s what Fin said: everyone still thought it was all crack.
“Naw.” East glanced at Sony. “Where you come from?”
“I’m from Jackson, Mississippi. I go to New Hope Christian School in Jackson.” She nodded back at the neighborhood kids. “Them’s my cousins. My aunt’s getting married in Santa Monica tomorrow.”
“Girl, we don’t give a fuck,” said Antonio, up in the yard.
“Listen to these little gangsters,” the girl sang. “Y’all even go to school?”
Probably from a good neighborhood, this girl. Probably had a mother who told her, Keep away from them LA ghetto boys, so what was the first thing she did?
East clipped his voice short. “You don’t want to be over here. You want to get on and play.”
“You don’t know nothing about what I want,” boasted the girl. She waved at Antonio. “And this little boy here who looks like fourth grade. What are you? Nine?”
“Damn,” Sony cheered her, chuckling.
Somewhere fire engines were gunning, moving again; East stepped back and listened. A woman and a daughter walked by arguing about candy. And the helicopter still chopping. It tensed East up. There were too many parts moving.
“Girl, back off,” he said. “I don’t need you mixed up.”
“You’re mixed up,” said the girl. She put one hand on the wall, immovable like little black girls got. A fighter.
“This kid,” East snorted. The last thing you wanted by the house was a bunch of kids. Women had sense. Men could be warned. But kids, they were gonna see for themselves.
—
A screech careened up the flat face of the street, hard to say from where. Tires. East’s talkie phone crackled on his hip. He scooped it up. It was Needle at the north lookout. But all East heard was panting, like someone running or being held down. “What is it?” East said. “What is it?” Nothing.
He scanned, backpedaling up the lawn.
Something was coming. Both directions, echoing, like a train.