“Tell me one thing,” he said. “The judge, could he have gone to LA already?”
“I guess,” Walter said. “Possible. But I’m going to say no.”
“Because of what?”
Walter winced. “Stuff you don’t know about,” he repeated.
“More stuff. Shit.” East kicked a pinecone. “Burn these woods up, man.”
—
Somehow they’d gotten low on gas. All tired. All angry. East took it personally. The empty house was another house lost. He had tried to keep it straight. But now everyone would kill one another at the first sideways look.
East fired the van through the little bubble of light that was the town and back into the dark, pine-jagged night. The big highway home lay to the south, so he took them north—toward the other lake, the ghetto lake, just by instinct. Just a glimpse of the big highway and it was over. The job would be over. If it weren’t already.
All the miles, he thought. Nothing.
“Why we ain’t got a cell?” grumbled Ty. “So much time wasted finding these phones.”
“You know why,” Walter said.
“You know there’s a way to do it. You just too scary of everything.”
“I’m Murder One scary,” Walter replied. Staring out at nothing.
“All right. All right,” East broke in. “Look. Wasn’t there a pay phone up at Welfare Lake?”
“Yep.”
“Do you know, while we were sleeping, some dude tried to rob us up there?”
Walter giggled. “What do you mean, tried to?”
“White dude with a little gun in his hand. I gave him three.” Before it had seemed funny, a story he could save up and tell. Now it didn’t have much in it.
“So he did rob us,” said Ty. “Whyn’t you wake me?”
“Think about it,” said Walter. “Think for a minute why he didn’t wake you.”
—
Yes: a phone booth, a fisherman’s phone, at the second lake. It hung on a power pole beneath a light, the last few buzzing insects struggling through the cold air.
One woman, maybe thirty, forty, in dirty pink sandals, was on the line. Dolefully they watched her.
“What do you want to do?” asked East.
“Wait,” said Walter. “What are we gonna do? Drive around? Go back and freeze? How long you think she can stand there in that housedress?”
“That housedress looks warm,” Ty put in from the back. “I say she’ll be there all night.”
East parked the van two rows of spaces out and killed the lights. Left the van to idle. He broke open a water bottle, but it only made him colder.
“Wonder what she’s talking about,” Walter said, cracking his neck side to side.
Her feet were bare in the fuzzy sandals. She looked over her shoulder and winced at the sight of the van. Then turned back.
“When we get on there, talk if you want. But I got to ask a few questions,” Walter said.
“I don’t even care. You talk,” East said. “What is stuff I don’t know about? That’s what I want to know.”
“We see his credit cards. Okay?” Walter said. “Don’t ask who, don’t ask where. I’ll tell you two things, then you forget them. One, we got people watching his credit cards. Two, if something like an airline ticket came through, Abraham Lincoln would have told us. Told us when, told us where. That’s why I don’t think so.”
“But Abraham Lincoln ain’t answering his phone.”
“Today he ain’t,” said Walter gloomily. “I’ll concede that.”
The woman on the phone held out a hand and backhanded the air five, six times. Like she were reenacting the slapping of a child.
“Shit, I can’t stand it,” said East, and he swung the door open and jumped out. Colder here, now. And quiet.
The woman bared her teeth at him before he was ten feet away.
“You get away from me!” she raged. “You get back! I got here first!”
“Ma’am,” East said. “Ma’am.”
“You git back!” she hissed. “This is my call!” A yellow rubber bracelet on her wrist holding one key. Gripping the receiver jealously, ready to give up everything for it, her one treasure on Earth. “There’s this boy here,” she shouted into the phone. “He wants the phone! Yes! And I told him, it’s my call. I paid! I came first! And now he won’t go away.”
East pushed the air down with his empty palms down, trying to settle. “Ma’am,” he cajoled. “Not hurrying you. Not hurrying you.”
“Yes, you are. Yes, you are!”
He had Ty’s little squirt gun in his pocket. It gave him an odd, lopsided feeling.
“How long you gonna be on, though? Ma’am!”
“How do I know?” the woman protested. “A minute, maybe? A few minutes? Damn!”
Blankly, East stared at the woman. Well, this sawed it. Ride for days, then crash up on this creature. Beggar-woman, they would have called her in The Boxes: steel-wool hair. Shoulder blades quivering under the housedress. His mother in white.
“A few minutes,” he conceded bitterly. He turned and walked to the van, where they’d be teasing him, he knew. Yes. Pealing laughter as soon as he opened the door.