Walter sobbed. “I seen it,” he blubbered. “I seen there wasn’t nothing but this. We knew you would.”
“We who?”
“Me and Michael,” said Walter. “We knew it was gonna happen like this. Mike, he says, one of these brothers gonna kill the other. I thought he was joking. I said, that’s bad news for Easy. And he said, naw, my money’s on East.”
“Bullshit,” East said. “You making it up. Like everything.”
“No,” wept Walter. “It don’t matter.”
East chewed his lip.
“I’m sorry, man,” Walter sobbed. “I saw it coming. I told myself, no, I couldn’t do nothing. I didn’t get out the van. I couldn’t do nothing. I couldn’t stop you.”
“Stop me?” East said. “Ty’s the one out of control.”
“You the one who shot him. Who was cold to him the whole way.”
“I’m not cold to him.”
“You were,” Walter insisted.
East raced through the dark, dread like two hard hands working his guts, reshaping them, remaking his body. He felt every poke, every lump of food inside him, every stone on the road coming up from the tires to his seat. His road-shocked mind could not even keep time.
He had run from police before: standing yard, after fights, after hurling stones at the windows of stores, hoping something would break. Flight, they called it. One part fear, one part the blindest excitement you’d ever known. It freed you from time, from who you were or the matter of what you’d done. You darted, like a fish away from a net, like a dog outrunning a dogcatcher.
No flashing lights behind them. But no time either to think of his brother, or the other two, knocked down along their trail. And Walter’s grief was unending: his brother’s stoniness, just taking other form.
“I’m sorry,” he said once. But this just started Walter sobbing again.
None of us were perfect, East thought.
“Do you think I killed him?”
“You shot him in the chest, East.”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Walter said, “that’s how you kill people.”
—
Once, when Ty was about six, East had been sent to enforce his mother’s word. Back then their mother’s bedroom was sunlit and clean and the TV sat small and quiet in a corner—later, it took over the whole apartment. It was time for the TV to be off, their mother said, and Ty wouldn’t turn it off—SpongeBob or something. So East turned off the TV for him. Ty jumped up and hit him and turned it back on. East repeated their mother’s warning and pulled the plug out of the wall. Ty threw the remote and hit East in the head. When East got back from checking his head in the mirror, was he cut, the TV was back on. Louder than ever. East picked up Ty and locked them both out of the bedroom. He caught hell for it—that old broken lock, if you locked yourself out, the only way back in was to take the door off the hinges.
He toted his brother like a laundry sack, one arm locked around his chest and the other around his hips. Ty caught the hand that had him at the collarbone and bit the fourth finger of East’s left hand as hard as he could. First East screamed in anger and shock—it didn’t really hurt yet. Screaming stopped things: startled them, embarrassed them, gave them satisfaction. With Ty it only stilled East so that his teeth could get a better grip. That was when it began to hurt. East had stopped screaming to begin to fight his brother then—put him down, free his arms up, begin wrestling himself out of a set of teeth that only clamped on tighter. That was when he began to imagine simply living as a sort of undying battle. Sometimes in the right kind of light, he could still see the indentations—the chain of little tooth marks circling—in the brown of his skin.
Different roads, different land, but East, half dreaming at the wheel, imagined the days in rewind: his brother, restored. The van, undamaged. The wooded house, undisturbed. The red moustache with his gun, bored and lonely near the swings. Back out the roads, without the guns, without all the food. Michael Wilson waiting for them by the foot of a bridge somewhere, welcoming. All forgiven. Like sometimes when he would sit up chilled and guilty from a horrible dream and stay there, the black string humming inside him, trying to breathe, to reassure himself that nothing had happened. But there would be no reassuring. Walter’s weeping made sure of that. He looked down at his hands, still clad in the dark gloves they’d been issued.
He stopped the van just one time, to reach behind him, under the middle bench, and find the empty black shoes, sticky with pine sap and crumbly soil, a bud of pine needles caught in the laces. Maybe wet with something, maybe just cold, as the air was. He couldn’t look. He rolled his window down, gunned into the oncoming lane, and let the shoes tumble into a ditch dark with reeds and litter, things that had grown there and things left behind.