In the bottom of the bag, a pawful of napkins, maybe twenty. A long slash of orange in the southern gray sky like a headache, like a crack.
The land changed, from flat and open to woods brooding over a series of prone, steplike hills. People here had hollowed out deep spaces—a long drive back from their armored mailboxes to their houses in the trees. Some were big and pointed, full of shapely windows; others were little boxes made of cinder-block. In front of or beside their houses the people here arrayed their cars and pickups and boats, and some kept dogs on leads or in stockades.
On the shoulder where he walked, East felt the eyes of every driver on the road. He would have kept to the woods, but the last thing he needed was some person’s dog latching on.
Here and there he saw a horse or cow. Or raised boxes in a little cloud. Meat smoking, he thought—or something. Then he got a good look and saw one clouded by bees. Bees: one time back when he still went to school, they’d shown a movie about them. Little colonies, getting along, everyone doing for the queen. Some teacher tried to start a hive up on top of the school—got beekeeper suits and everything. But then a boy had been stung fifty times and had gone to the hospital, and that was the end of lessons with bees.
—
He kept walking, getting far from the little town, the little car. That car was the bone that connected him to Iowa. In Iowa, the van was the bone that connected him to Wisconsin. Somewhere the judge and his daughter lay, and somewhere his brother lay, unable to say his name. Bones. Walter and Michael Wilson, on the ground in LA or anywhere. They could be anywhere. Walter would keep it airtight. Michael Wilson: all East could hope was that he stayed out of trouble, stayed free of anything where telling what he knew was something he could bargain with.
He wondered who was watching. Not about the police—of course they were. Of course they looked funny at every step he took. He knew how to walk around the police. Even carrying the gun in his pocket, he didn’t fear being stopped by them.
It wasn’t just the police that worried him. It was the stop he wouldn’t see coming. The little town centers had been swept and were quiet, older white men catching him in their eyes, holding him there a moment: Single skinny black boy walking nowhere. Had a cap on. Enough to remember him by. Enough to provide a description, or to find him again. They said “Hello there,” and East nodded, walked by. Grateful for daylight.
It was on the unswept edges of town that East noticed the litter of the life—the little circles of stamped-down wrappers, abandoned bottles. He veered off his line on the shoulder of the road to look: yes. The vials and pinchies, the little knots of activity, torn-off matchbooks, plastic ice cream spoons scorched half through. Firing up a plastic spoon, he thought, shaking his head. Over in the blacktop refuse and colorful trash that waited outside the border of the lot for nothing, splotches of vomit and the warm, sad smell of piss.
Right out on the edge of the main road they were doing it. It was these people he needed to avoid. He had had plenty of friends who’d used, who’d become deep U’s before they were teenagers. He could resist them. But he had no friends out here. He wondered how young they would be.
—
The old lady’s face returned to him, her pointed voice, and he heard her talking to Walter as he walked in the cold. He saw her looking at him. Or sometimes it was the face of the Jackson girl, leaking blood and going to sleep on the street, or the screaming mouth of the girl in Wisconsin. Her body, under the toppled suitcase. All of it inside him now, screaming to get out. Everything.
Another mile, he thought. Another mile.
As he passed a gas station, two men asked did he need a ride. He looked up, but then one was talking to the other, even though they were both looking at him. Two of them, one of him. He put his head down.
His sense of the direction was partial. But the winter sun kept slipping to the right. Soon he could walk under the cover of darkness.
A while after every intersection, the highway sign said EAST. So he kept on.
—
Inside he was used up, but his body pleased him, as if it were a specimen he were observing. Even after hours of walking, his body was light. When it rained lightly, the rain did not chill. He breathed it, absorbed it with his skin; it sated him, and the wind dried what it left in his sweater. The wind pushed him. His legs, so soft after driving, came back warm and good and hard. When he bent to retie a shoe, they quivered like engines idling.
How long he had walked he had no idea. It grew dark and colder, and he would have to decide. It was going to get a lot colder. He could see the plants shrinking, small plumes from chimneys. A regret hit him: couldn’t he have driven the car one more day? Couldn’t he have driven this all in an hour?