East picked up a pine bough, the needles dry and brittle but still arrayed. He held it over his face, peering through it. The man was coming to the house, thumbing through keys.
He stopped, the man, at the front door and caused an overhead light to come on. They could see him—large, a black man. East wondered: Our black man? The man opened the door and moved through the open space to the kitchen. On the counter he laid a satchel or briefcase. The lights he switched on there were furious, bright, paint-store white: yes. They threw a glare that filled the yard, that counted the trees. East flinched at it.
Were they covered? Deep enough? That last-second dilemma of hide-and-seek: Could you find a better place? Or did moving expose you now?
Slowly the man stepped back out of the kitchen, into one of the sides of the house, soundless—like watching TV with the mute on. Into the kitchen next came the girl. East watched her reach up. She took a cup down from a cabinet and a plastic jug of water from somewhere below and poured a drink.
Dark. Black dark. Hard to make out her features or her age.
“No water,” Ty said. “They’re just camping out here, man.”
“Was that him?” Walter said. “East?”
East stared until his forehead hurt. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Best make sure,” said Ty. “If I shoot, he ain’t coming back.”
Madly East tried to flip through the pictures in the back of his mind. To see again what Johnny had shown them that morning. He could bring up the man’s suit, his heft. Could remember nothing of his face.
Silently the man and girl moved around the lighted house, specimens in a box. So blindingly bright. East felt his stomach begin to knot.
“Just knock,” Ty muttered. “If he answers, ask is he the judge we’re here to shoot.”
“What about the girl?” whispered Walter.
“Don’t shoot her,” said East.
“She ain’t a target,” Ty said, “but she better not fuck with me.”
“That’s cold,” Walter said, “shooting the dude in front of her. Because he looks like, you know—her dad.”
Ty didn’t say anything. East held the fallen bough close. The dry needles prickled across his cheeks.
“You decided yet?” said Ty impatiently.
The neighbors’ houses were distant, dull shapes. The stars wheeled above them, forgotten. East chewed a pine needle. Strange, bitter, sweet, like orange peel somehow. His eyes tightened on the blaring light.
The girl accelerated things. Two people there: one person you had to peel away. To ignore, to not shoot. But that’s how it worked. You thought you had the rhythm, that your pace was the world’s pace. Then someone busted a move. Someone drove up in a fleet of black-and-whites and disrupted. Someone opened a door. The world would have its way with you. You and your plan. There was only that lesson to learn.
You could pretend that it would not, that all your breathing and all your insulation would protect you. Ask Michael Jackson. Ask anyone in LA. Earthquakes rattled up out of nowhere. No radar, nobody yelling Incoming, no warning text on your phone. Only the house jangling, things falling off the wall. East was fifteen. He’d never been through a big one.
Stop. Stop it, he told himself.
He spat out the pine needle and began creeping, moving left along the line of woods around the house. The thrown light was as bright as a ball field: he had to stay well clear. Dark clothes, dark shoes, dark branch, dark skin. One night Sony had brought along his sister’s astronomy book from school—she went to a special all-girl science school she had to ride an hour to get to—and they observed the stars they couldn’t see in the LA sky, they studied the words that weren’t used in The Boxes.
Albedo. Can a body throw back light. It might have been the last word he’d ever learned. East’s albedo was near zero. Not much bounced back off him.
He’d been tracking toward the front of the house, but then the man appeared again at the back, in the kitchen. He lit a match, got the pilot going on the stove. He poured water from a bottle into a silver kettle and set it down. The light over his head drowned his face in shadows. Graying hair. Maybe fifty. Solid, thick shoulders. He washed and dried the girl’s cup.
East stopped and sighted through the bedroom windows. Through one he could see the girl stepping into a bathroom on the other side. Light spilled into the hallway, then the door narrowed and snuffed it out.
Give me a minute, he’d told Ty. Because from what he saw, he could tell nothing, could conclude nothing.
Then the man was moving again, stepping to the front door. East watched him flicker past one window, then the next. At the front door he rummaged in his pockets. Where was Ty now? Ty was waiting. Waiting on him.