“Well,” Walter sniffed. “Best hope you don’t have to prove it. Antoine is clean, man. Keep him that way.”
“I’m clean,” said East. “I never been picked up. My name’s good.”
“Ain’t you lucky,” Walter said. “Shh, here comes the man.”
The trooper had hit his light, blue and white pulsing off everything. Walter cut speed and shifted his path right.
But the cop sped on by.
“See?” East said. “Nothing to worry about.”
Walter exhaled a long, tense breath. He smelled like fried food, sweat, and oil. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I should have woken you up earlier. Talking to you, it’s sure to make me feel better.”
—
Walter was floating before the headlights, big 4XL Dodgers jersey lit to boiling. Another dream East was having about the road—or so he thought. Then he saw the chain-link, that they were in a rest stop, not in a lane. Behind Walter’s body was a pay phone.
Walter was making the second call. East bolted up in his seat. But Walter was already hanging up, the pink flyer in one hand, atlas in the other. He turned, spotted East behind the windshield, and nodded.
“Got it,” he grunted, opening his door. “You want to drive, or should I?”
“You must have crept out smooth,” East accused him.
“You were sleeping.”
“You got no business making the call without me.”
“I’ll drive, then.” Walter tugged the seat belt around himself uncomfortably. There was no good fit. “Yeah, I got business.”
Bitterly East said, “I need to be on there when we call.”
“East,” Walter began, “I ain’t your boy. I made the call. Like you did before. Do I feel better, since now I know? Yes. Who got directions? The one who can read did. Read a sign. Read a map.”
“I can read,” said East.
“Ain’t you lucky,” Walter said. “You ready?”
East snatched the flyer from Walter. Handwriting covered the back side now—terrible writing, scratches, loops slanting downhill.
“I can’t read this,” East said at last. “No one can read this.”
“That’s right, son,” Walter said. “Nobody but me. I can read every word.”
It was night now, thickening. A bread truck sat disabled two spaces down, the doors gaping. Like a foreclosed house.
“What they say about Michael Wilson?”
“We didn’t talk about Michael Wilson. Why we want to talk about him?”
“Don’t sneak around on me,” East snapped.
“You’re so angry,” Walter said. “Put me out too. Go on. It was always gonna come down to you. You and your little brother. I knew it. You headstrong street Negroes. You were always gonna win. So do it now.”
“Come on,” East said, steaming.
“I mean it,” Walter said. “Here the keys, then. Put me out.”
Schoolgirl drama. But Walter had him beat.
“Come on,” East groaned again.
Walter spat out the door and palmed the keys back. He started up the van and checked the mirrors. “About an hour,” he said. “Then we get off the road.”
Finally East relented. “What did they tell you? About the stop?”
“Easy. Grocery store about twenty miles off the road. We meet up with a truck. Follow them. Everything’s paid for. They don’t know us. We just get and go.”
“What kind of people?”
Walter picked up speed. A strange field of lighted wire deer glowed in the distance. “They didn’t tell me that.”
9.
“What state are we in again?”
“Iowa.”
Walter was still frosty at East. He’d dropped off the interstate without an announcement. When East had asked, after some driving, “You headed where the guns are?” Walter nodded once. Merely.
“This the way the directions said?”
“Uh-huh.”
It was their first real stretch off the interstate. First time East had seen country like this. All East thought of Iowa was a map and outlines of products: corn, a tractor, the smiling head of a dairy cow. That was Iowa to his mind.
This road had none of those. Houses thrown up like milk cartons in lonely space—dingy, flat, unpainted cinder-block foundations. Strips of siding hanging off the corners like bandages. In front of each waited a little collection of beat-up vehicles like a boy would arrange in a sandbox. Cheap LED Christmas lights glowed from behind the windows, and sometimes, behind the drainage ditches, a Baby Jesus was standing yard.
Their backyards stood empty, a darkness forever.
The boys rode quiet and tense, East feeling the shifting road through his seat. A little town arose with its dull light reflected on the bottoms of clouds. Signs, steeples, a little grocery store closed for the evening, red still glowing in the plastic letters along the roofline.
“This is it,” Walter said. He coasted into the lot, splashed through the puddles. Out here it had already rained, or been hosed down, one or the other.
“This is it?”
“Ain’t it enough for you?”
“Walt, man,” East said. “Just, you don’t run guns at the food store.”
“They do.” Walter pulled the van around once and then sat idling, lights on. “You feeling better?”