“Not if he isn’t.”
Then dogs exploded, barking, and Walter started; East sat bolt upright. A dark slash between the houses. Ty was sprinting out, footing it down the street toward where he’d jumped out of the van. “Catch him,” East said, and Walter put the van in Drive and veered it. Ty held the gun out plain as he ran: Do not fuck with me. Sprinting down the street as if he didn’t even see them, didn’t even care.
At the last moment he cut to the van and popped the door.
“What?” East demanded. “What did you do?”
Ty slid onto the middle seat. Panting and laughing both. “I told you, man, you paid too much.”
Walter ran the stop sign heading them out to the county road. “What did you do?”
“I told you.” Ty threw down the fold of twenties. “Four hundred eighty dollars. Now who’s your daddy?” Regally he surveyed the world through the windows, the morning coming down.
10.
It was natural, Ty said, the way into the yellow house. A window up high was cracked open to the cold. He’d stolen a stepladder off a garage. If he could make the back-porch roof, he could get inside.
But he hadn’t had to. He was crossing the backyard with the aluminum stepladder when someone came out of the house. “Crippled dude. Bad spine.”
“Phillip,” said Walter.
“Skinny. Look like he hurt to walk.”
“Yeah. That’s him.”
“Phillip. First thing Phillip sees, black boy stealing a ladder. He came for me, man, gonna whup me with his car keys. You know, crime stopper? So I take my ladder and I knock Phillip on his ass, thinking, this will work: I’ll just walk him back in with a gun in his ass. But guess what’s in Phillip’s hand with the keys?”
East said, “Four hundred eighty dollars.” So crazy, he marveled, this charging on, with no idea what lay ahead.
“So beautiful,” Walter cheered.
Ty grinned, angelic, contemptuous. “Thinks he got mugged by some kid from the block!”
—
Twenty miles east, they picked out a pancake house for the first sit-down meal in two days. Pancakes like no pancakes East had ever seen. Fluffy, meaty, thick as steaks.
“We’ll make it today,” Walter was saying, “just a few hours.”
Euphoria had chased off the morning chill. It was easy to explain: new guns. Plenty of bullets. Money back. Ty smirking, all his dice landing sweet. That afternoon they could find a place, get some rest. But that wasn’t everything on East’s chest. The other thing that had warmed him that morning, even in that horrible house with the men and their pioneer ancestors standing guard together, and the baby on the gunpowder floor like a business card—even there, East had found himself hungry to make it work. To make the deal, straight, shake hands with the bastards. They had almost closed it, businesslike. Then Ty made his raid, and they all had that to hoot about, even if it was cheap and hard, even if it marked them, set them apart.
So that’s it, he thought, working on his stack of pancakes, which he never should have ordered; he could never eat all that. So that’s us. Just some thieving hoodlums, all across America.
—
Back outside, the cold was a jolt.
East drove. He nudged Walter: could they afford to stop somewhere, anywhere, get a room, shower, and a good sleep? “Don’t want to do that,” Walter replied. “Don’t want to have to register. Not now, not this close to, you know. Where we’re going.”
So they would go until they got there, they decided. Arrive, circle, spot out the land. Make a plan and follow it.
Walter took the wheel back after a couple of hours. He exited onto a smaller highway, a Wisconsin state road, two-lane, rich black pavement, deep flood ditches dug on either side. The trees grew higher—and closer to the road. Pines, not thin and fire-hungry like California’s, but tight-knit, impassable, winter-coated trees, their cones as thick as cats on the branches, green so deep it was blackish. Passing so close, they ripped East’s eyes with their tiny, intimate spaces, tree to tree, branch to branch, too quick to see. They flashed by like the opposite of mountains, the grand spaces, the eons of time. Here, too many things to see and zero time to see anything. Around the back of every trunk, something could be hiding. East closed his eyes, but he didn’t feel comfortable not watching either—Walter, the van, the narrow road. The deep, unforgiving ditches, the reaching trees. His eyes saw faces in them, every frightened bird an attacker, every mailbox a blaze of threatening color.
He was exhausted and could only watch. Walter was exhausted and could only drive. Like neither of them knew how to stop. And then they were there.
—