East uttered a strangled cry and slapped her hand, like a snake lunging. The girl drew her fingers back. He tried to go dead-faced again, but he was shaking.
“I’m sorry,” said the girl, Maggie. Her voice was higher than East had imagined. “Maybe I shouldn’t—”
“Aw, Maggie,” Michael Wilson begged. “This boy, this little boy—Maggie, don’t be listening.”
He put his hands on her and she squirmed. “I better go.”
East reset himself. He knew: the way she glanced back at the station. Like now it held things she’d forgotten: people, stuffed animals. She longed for it. Her nerve had fled.
“Maggie, aw,” moaned Michael Wilson, sticky with desire.
Girls had sense. You could back them down. Girls saw bluster, knew its purpose. Boys, they just flew into the air over nothing, rose up with their dicks all hard, and then people got killed. Like at the house.
Michael Wilson was going to fly up now. Had to.
He pled with her first, grabbed at her. “But I can’t,” she said, and then the gold shoes were on the pavement. The glass door—WELCOME, THESE CARDS ACCEPTED HERE—opened for her.
Michael Wilson made a little click in his mouth. “Damn,” he said. “There she goes.”
He clenched the hand he’d been grabbing at Maggie with and fired it at East’s head.
East ducked and sheltered down. “Drive,” he muttered, and Walter did. Michael rose up under the low blue ceiling, but he couldn’t throw a right, not with East balled down in the shotgun seat. Between the seats, he came with two lefts, the second hard enough to light East’s eyes with salt.
“Go!” East gasped. “Drive!”
The sliding door hung open, cool air rushing in. Again East ducked and the turn around the lot rocked Michael Wilson. He recovered and swung again, and East deflected it—another hard turn made Michael brace.
Walter sped the van up the ramp hard, as if he could stop this fight with gas. “Careful, Mike,” he complained. “You gonna make me crash.”
“Pull off, then,” Michael steamed. “Because I’m gonna whup this bitch.” He sat back, fists clenched. “Fuck you up,” he promised East.
As soon as an EXIT 1 MILE sign came up, Walter hit the turn signal. East touched his face. His blood was in his ears and head now, the black string yawning, almost audible. He knew he had to play his cards now.
“What’s up with you, Walt?” he appealed. “You just, ‘Cool, we with this girl now’?”
Walter whined something indistinct. Hunkered down with his steering wheel. Behind him Michael Wilson sat and laughed, stretching his shoulders, limbering.
East turned on him. “Oh, now you’re a muscleman. Just do your job.”
In a high, public voice Michael Wilson declaimed: “Easy. I know where you’re at. You just a little street faggot, ain’t ever seen a girl. But I have. That girl was * for everyone.”
Trying to line the boys up.
Walter braked the van down from eighty, seventy, fifty-five. The exit was a dead one, disused fields, one cracked concrete lot where someone had built once to make money. Across the highway, one lone gas station still hoisted its sign.
Nobody in sight. Here is where it was going to happen.
“Boy, you do not do to fuck with me,” Michael Wilson boomed, “and now you will know.”
Walter put the van in Park, and East just held on. This is it, he thought. Didn’t know when it would come, but he knew that it would.
If all there was was a fistfight, he was going to get beat. Maybe worse than beat. But if there was a vote, maybe he’d win it. East had Walter. Walter had wanted that girl, but he’d dropped her off too. Walter wanted what was right. Maybe he would help.
Ty? East didn’t know what he had.
Michael Wilson was getting up. East hollered, “Everybody out!” and jumped out first. Sweating already.
He made two fists, weighed them. His arms had never seemed skinnier.
This is it.
Then Michael Wilson was rushing across the cracked pavement.
They said that sometimes when you got your ass kicked, your mind sold out your body, stopped taking it personally, only crept back when the whupping was done. East’s mind went nowhere. Calculating. Michael Wilson wasn’t gonna kill him, not over this girl. But what did a fool do when he’d shown himself? He built up. He went pro on it. Became the hardest fool he could.
Michael Wilson stopped then, to strip off his meshy white Dodgers shirt and drape it on the van’s side mirror. Gym muscles down his belly like puppies in a litter. The muscles were what broke the bottle of fear inside East.
“Listen, man,” he pleaded. “I’ll spell it out for you.”
“Shut up,” said Michael Wilson. “Should have done this a thousand miles ago.” Some Chinese tattoo in the meat of his arm. He locked his fist and drove.